Embassy of the Russian Federation in Bangladesh has issued a press release on “statements made by several Western embassies regarding so-called “Holodomor” in social media. Below is the details:
We have noticed the statements made by several Western embassies regarding so-called “Holodomor” in social media. They are promoting the false thesis that the Soviet leadership deliberately and purposefully “starved” millions of Ukrainians. Such interpretation of the 1930s events fundamentally distorts history.
90 years ago, a large-scale crop failure and food shortages became a real humanitarian catastrophe for the Soviet Union. The devastating consequences were a common tragedy for Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs and many other ethnic groups of the huge country. Thinking otherwise only testifies to the lack of objectivity, overall ignorance and politically charged hypocrisy.
The present attempts to draw historical parallels between those events of the first half of the twentieth century and the situation around Ukrainian grain look even more preposterous and absurd. The argument, heavily promoted by the collective West, that if, because of Russia, tons of Ukrainian grain do not reach the global market, than millions in Africa will die of hunger, simply does not hold up to scrutiny.
In reality, giant corporations from the US and Europe buy Ukrainian grain on the cheap and earn fabulous profits in the markets of developed countries. The truly needy countries receive only crumbs (about 3%). In 2022, grain imports to the EU from Ukraine increased by 162% in value terms as compared to 2021 – from 1.8 to the record 4.6 billion euros. Grain imports to the EU from Ukraine continued to grow in 2023. It more than doubled from January to June 2023, as compared to the same period in 2022 (from 1.4 to 3.1 billion euros and from 5.3 to 11.2 million tons).
Unilateral sanctions, including threats of mass arrests of dry cargo ships and disconnection of Russian financial institutions from the SWIFT system, have significantly exacerbated the problem of disruption of logistics and financial chains involving Russian economic operators. Given Russia’s prominent role in agro-industrial trade, this could not but affect the supply of food products to our partners. Artificial obstacles to the Russian agricultural export can cause real consequences in the form of malnutrition, up to starvation, in certain regions of the world, but, surprisingly, it does not bother Washington, London and Brussels at all.
So, who has truly created a threat to global food security?
We call on Western officials to finally recognize the key role that the West has been playing in fomenting the Ukrainian crisis. Using the tragedy of Holodomor to justify greater allocations of taxpayers’ money to build more defense factories is beyond the pale.
